No
Peter Tatchell trying to bully women into agreeing that men can be women. Men can’t be women. That sex is already taken.
Tip Jar
Peter Tatchell trying to bully women into agreeing that men can be women. Men can’t be women. That sex is already taken.
That flyer really does read sinister (sinisterly? Sinisterly? Anyway…)… “Don’t you dare spend a moment not thinking of us.”
Not sure it’s meant that way, but not sure it’s not either. Lovely rights campaign you’ve got here, be a shame if someone thought you weren’t centering US…
If the L wanted to be just L, without the B or G, they should be allowed to do that. Same with any of the other alphabets. Yes, they have a strength as a cohesive group – LGB has done a lot of work to get their rights. But if one of the groups, or any combination, want to organize for themselves, that should be their right. BIPOC members have their own groups. Feminists have subgroups of people who identify as black feminists, lesbian feminists, etc. It’s part of having rights. You get to decide who you want to associate with. If T is treating you badly, you have a right to say “No T for me.”
But no. Every minute must be T time.
“Demand rights for all women, including trans women.” Huh. Where on that flyer does it mention anything about rights for women?
“No LGB without the T.” Why? Must everything be mixed together? There are plenty of things that are about T without LGB, why can’t LGB have things, too? It’s a ridiculous position that does nothing for T welfare, it only condemns certain organizations for daring to advocate for a different subset of people.
ibbica – I think it’s pretty safe to assume it is meant that way. It’s a slam at the LGB Alliance, for one thing.
Too bad it hasn’t been reciprocal: No T without the LGB.
Considering that LGB were nice enough to have solidarity with a group that also suffers from discrimination and misunderstanding, it’s been a real betrayal for T to shove everybody else out of the way to stand in front (like a certain NATO leaders’ group photo from a few years ago). As I experienced the takeover, it was lesbians who initially were ejected from their own groups — from lesbian groups! — for not wanting to share space and time with self-centered men, i.e., not lesbians, and not even women.
ETA:
T don’t “stand united” with LGB or W, or anybody. What is this “united we stand” BS? Liars, traitors, manipulators, gaslighters, narcissists.
“No LGB without the T.”
That’s a demand or threat, not a request.
Why? Why does sexual orientation need to be yoked with “gender identity?” Lesbian, gay, and bisexual people are under no obligation to include trans people in all of their activities and organizations. They aren’t connected; they are completely different things. It’s like saying “No Black people without Vegans” or “No Left-Handed People without Atheists.” Can’t the T stand up on its own, like any other grown-ups? Must they crash other people’s parties, and women’s rights? TIMs are nobody’s “sisters.” Trans activists are free to go…center themselves.
Of course they can’t. Besides, that’s a lot of work. The LGB spent decades working to get the rights they (sort of) enjoy today, imperfect but more than, say Oscar Wilde had.
Women worked hard to get the rights we have today. Again, imperfect, but more than my grandmother had.
Why should trans do all that work? After all, privileged white men are used to women doing the work for them. All they have to do is show up, and sometimes shout a bit if the woman doesn’t know her place, and if that doesn’t work, start punching. Sooner or later, the woman will do the work. They had to co-opt LGB because they are lazy, entitled, privileged white males. They don’t actually know how to do the real work of getting rights.
@ibbica #1
Sinisterly? Well, he is holding it in his left hand.
It makes it seem like Pedo Tatchell wants the “cotton ceiling” to be a cotton floor.
Well said. As to that last point – the reason they don’t actually know how to do the real work of getting rights is because they’re the demographic which has always had all the rights. The reason they are bullying people is because they want privileges, and to take away the rights of other people to say “No!”
The “why can’t the LGB just have a separate group for their own particular concerns?” question always seems a bit disingenuous to me. It’s not as if they’re only meeting to discuss health problems or gay history or esoteric issues which could only apply to single-sex relationships. The major activity of LGB groups is bashing the ideology of the T’s: their pseudoscientific theories, deceptive practices, dubious therapies, and dangerous encroachments into feminism and gay rights. I’ve looked at newsletters and websites. While there are some other topics, the focus tends to range from puberty blockers to the Cotton Ceiling to Transing Away the Gay. All things that, in my opinion, need bashing.
I had an extended online conversation with a gay man who was absolutely convinced that T belonged with LG & B, no doubt about it. Anything else was bigotry. His explanation came down to “every single insult and argument that was hurled at me as a gay man is hurled at trans folks. ‘It’s just a phase; you’re faking it; you’ll burn in Hell; you should stay out of the bathrooms; keep out of communal showers; you’re a predator.” He thought that similarity was incontrovertible evidence that LGBT was but a single group, with the exact same enemies, and dismissed my mention of the LGB groups by insisting that since they used the same abusive arguments the religious right and other bullies used, and were therefore the same enemy.
Sastra – Well, yes, but that’s because the T have made it impossible NOT to spend way too much time bashing the T ideology.
@Sastra #12
You’re probably more read-up than I am, but I have noticed similar things in what I’ve seen, and my impression is this: It is only a recent phenomenon that there are LGB groups that do not deal with T issues. I think they were formed in part to allow discussion and criticism of those particular areas that the T connection would not allow them to address. Eventually I would expect the focus to broaden.
There are also lesbian groups; what I’ve seen of them show attention to a combination of women’s issues, lesbian-specific issues, and combating the T bandwagon.
Re the “same arguments, same enemy” position: I hate that, and it’s so damn common.
@Ophelia;
Agree. But it’s not like feminists who knit forming their own feminist group as a subset of the larger one. The LGB groups split in protest of what the larger group has come to represent.
But the Q and the T are later additions, and it’s not really an iron law that they all have to be glued together all the time.
Yeah, the T crashed the party, trashed the house, ate all the food, drank all the beer, and then expected the LGB to pick up after them, and pay for the damage. So some people just moved to a new house where the T can’t come.
No one should pay attention to this wannabe pedo.
Here’s one he wouldn’t have heard back in the day: “You’re not actually a woman; you are a man.”
Not an argument, but a fact.
Also, not an insult, unless one thinks being a man is insulting.
Here’s another: Sex is real, gender is bullshit.
How about, “”Woman: adult human female, not a role, a costume, a performance, a set of stereotypes, or an idea in a man’s head.”
So no, not all the same, not even insults.
@YNNB
Well put.
Worth pointing out that actual pedophiles have some of the same insults/arguments thrown at them: you’re a pervert, a deviant, a predator, etc. But nobody seriously thinks that they should be added to the LGBTQ movement and defended on the same terms.
I’m not suggesting this is a direct analogy to trans people. There’s a eminently good rationale for excluding pedophiles that doesn’t apply to trans adults, i.e. it’s not just consenting adults deciding what to do with their bodies. I’m just pointing out that the “common enemies lobbing the same insults” heuristic only gets you so far.
LGB should not have any letters added to it, it means sexual orientation or preference. Feminism stands on it’s own, (anti)racism stands on it’s own, along with other marginalized groups. It’s unfair to LGB to just add letters whenever some “identity” group decides to become a “movement”. LGB didn’t start out as FLGB and parasite off of feminism or other civil rights groups, because it’s a different thing. T is not sexual preference, it is something else. It’s useful to make distinctions in order to pick out what exactly we are referring to, and lumping everything together is lazy, opportunistic, and puerile.
“One of these things is not like the other” is classic Sesame Street, the target age group is about the age when young humans should be making distinctions between types of things, ffs. :P
Good points, twiliter. And the LGB also should not have to accept when the new letter immolates the LGB and dances victory dances over the ashes. The T have made sure LGBTQRSTUVWXYZ are not about L or G anymore; they are all about T. Anyone who tries to swing it back toward L or G will be termed a bigot, dog piled, and cancelled.
Not quite “nobody”, but almost nobody. There were influential people in the gay movement who wanted to “liberate” teenagers and to lower the age of consent. (Martin Duberman advocates this still; certainly in a 2018 book of his that I read.) There was an article I saw within the last year on the history of such efforts in the gay movement, but I can’t find it at the moment.
Peter Tatchell is one, which is a major reason a lot of feminists do not like him.
Screechy:
This is unfortunately not the case. There is a movement for “minor attracted people” (MAPs) to be brought within the rainbow. And, of course, history’s kinda icky.
Pedophilia does not mean same sex attracted, therefore not an LGB category either. For the same reason trans does not mean same sex attracted people, because the number of trans people who are heterosexual relative to their biological sex is not trivial. Therefore adding the T to LGB adds heterosexual people to the category, the same way letting trans “women” play women’s sports adds men to a women only category. It is wrong simply by definition, which is why it’s so irksome.
What’s next, speciesism, vegetarianism, ageism? You could add anything to LGB from abolitionists to zionists to complete the alphabet, but they still wouldn’t fit. LGB is a particular thing by definition.
Historically, as I recall from the 1970s (in the USA at least), there was a sexuality-based alphabet LGBT₁ where the word man₁ was defined by sex (the biological category) and the letter T₁ could mean a cross-dressing transvestite man₁ or a pre/post op transsexual man₁. That alphabet LGBT₁ would include Caitlyn Jenner as a post-op transsexual man₁ as his sexual kink.
But in 2015, Caitlyn Jenner came out in his Glamour magazine Women of the Year Award, rebranding the word trans and the letter T₂ in LGBT₂ to mean transgender (identity), erasing the sexual kink.
Tatchell’s tweet uses LGBT₂ to implicitly call his male siblings women and invoke misogyny as they displace female sex as a political class. LGBT₁ would not let him do that because LGBT₁ would make it clear that his siblings are men.
The rebranding of LGBT circa 2015 is a huge deal that I should research and explain further.
Dave @28, as far as I recall (having lived in oh-so-liberal Bay Area California), the T wasn’t added until at least the late 80’s, and at the time it mostly referred to transexuals and cross dressers that were same sex attracted. Trans has morphed into something much different now, and there is no reason to assume that a trans person is also same sex attracted, but back in the 70’s, one could generally assume transsexuals were also homosexual. This has not been the case for some time now, decades maybe. It’s more of a persona than anything else, and there are plenty of them that are heterosexual. Your example of Bruce Jenner is a case in point, he claims to still be heterosexual, or attracted to women according to his biological sex, which does not adhere to the trans dogma at all, because if he really thought he were a woman, he would consider himself a lesbian as some of the trans”women” do.